Sunday, February 15, 2009

773. In Memory of M. B. - Anna Akhmatova

Translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave, not sticks of burning incense.You lived aloof, maintaining to the end your magnificent disdain.You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes, and suffocated inside stifling walls.Alone you let the terrible stranger in, and stayed with her alone.Now you're gone, and nobody says a word about your troubled and exalted life.Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn at your dumb funeral feast.Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I, I, sick with grief for the buried past, I, smoldering on a slow fire, having lost everything and forgotten all,would be fated to commemorate a man so full of strength and will and bright inventions, who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.